Deadline Extended: CFP Enslaved Women, Migration, and Fugitivity

African American History / Studies, Black History / Studies, Latin American and Caribbean History / Studies, Slavery, Women's & Gender History / Studies

Panelists are needed for a panel being organized for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) Annual Conference October 2-6, 2019 in Charleston, South Carolina. The panel titled “Enslaved Women, Migration, and Fugitivity” examines the myriad ways enslaved women resisted slavery during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Resistance encompasses a variety of actions by enslaved women, which include fugitivity. The actions of freedom seeking women emerge from the moral and psychological morass of slavery and the social activism it gendered. As Cheryl Janifer LaRoche has argued, “although the constraints that kept women mired in captivity are well documented, their strategies for overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles to freedom are not.” Women faced limited mobility, little knowledge of geography, and concern for loved ones, further complicated by the encumbrances of escaping with young children. Although historians have identified these apprehensions as primary motivating factors for not escaping slavery, there were instances where enslaved women fled while managing family attachments in complex and innovative ways. Please send an abstract and an abbreviated cv to kcookbell@bowiestate.eduby April 1, 2019.